It sounds like the actual problem is

>This makes every person they might do business with to withdraw.

Hiding information from people sounds like a bandaid to the issue of people being overly judgemental. Maybe we need to be more accepting to rehabilitation.

Maybe instead of relying on humans to suddently act differently than they ever have in thousands of years, we could just remove the stupid link.

I mean, listen to yourself. Rather than an easy, technical solution, for a very limited and well defined problem, you're proposing we instead just wait until the billions upon billions of people on earth suddenly wise up, hit nirvana, sing Kum ba yah, and _be less judgemental_? So that, what, a giant, wealthy corporation isn't mildly bothered?

But there is no law that is crafted for this "very limited and well defined problem". "Right to be forgotten" goes much further than that. I can tentatively agree that for your proposed situation, it's unfair enough to former felons that it may require government intervention. Unfortunately, there's just no legislation that is focused and limited in scope in this regard; instead, the move is to broader, looser and vaguer laws like the GDPR.

If we have to consider the reality of the situation for felons, we must also face the reality that they don't really seem to be the end goal, but just a story to placate worries about overregulation and censorship.

> Rather than an easy, technical solution

If I am a search engine, and don’t comply, I am going to jail. It’s not easy nor technical.

The real problem is internet makes everything look like it happened yesterday. Traditional news is, well, news, but Google doesn’t really distinguish between yesterday and 20 years ago. Some 90s articles and pages are still perfectly relevant and should be on the first page of search results, others very much not so.

It does, though. The problem is that the most generally notable thing about a boring person who committed a serious crime 20 years ago is in fact the serious crime that they committed 20 years ago.

Put another way, if I put the name of my new neighbor into Google, the resulting webpage I would in fact most want to see as the result would definitely be the article on the murder they committed 20 years ago, even though they have a Facebook page that was updated 10 minutes ago. Facebook page can be result number 2.

If Google didn't show that result at all because it happened 20 years ago, and that person never did anything else notable more recently, I would consider Google to be a little broken.

Most people didn't commit murder 20 years ago but may have had a car accident or organized a loud party with weed while in college.

People change and your neighbor now has a family and lives quietly. It seems unfair the world should know him about his past mistakes

The same notability argument is still valid. It is not that search engines are broken, but the society which would view something that happened 20 years ago, while being the most notable fact about given person, as relevant for anything else than conversation-starter is broken.

This is a interesting point. You could imagine a partial simplistic solution that de ranked historical information for people unless it is specifically being asked for. It’s not clear that a search for a person’s “Bob Smith” nessacarily is interested in Bob’s 20 year old crimes, they might reasonably looking for things that person is currently doing like making music or writing or something else. This is the case when we search for celebrities. Now most people don’t have much interesting stuff on the internet so those old articles pop up. In fact those old arrivals typically have such low rankings that a common solution to this problem is to start a blog and be really aggressive about putting your name all over the place, if the point of Googling someone was to reliably find out if they have a criminal history from a long time ago you wouldn’t expect it to be so easily defeated.

Good luck changing human nature. In the meantime, can I just get it off of google so I can get a job and pay my damn bills?

Your approach is of little comfort to the people this actually affects.

This is a very interesting point. The internet brings its users ever closer together and it's not beyond reason to imagine this closeness reaching a point where it is similar to the closeness experienced by ancient tribes. Today we would find it hard to imagine, say, seeing our neighbors naked but it was once very normal. So we've come to expect a certain amount of privacy.

A reduction in this privacy might precipitate a change in how people react to learning the private affairs of others. If everybody's legal history was laid bare, for instance, one might discover that getting in trouble is something quite a lot of people do--and in this light one might temper his reaction to learning of another's checkered past.

Except this theory doesn't work with today's search technology. For popular people (or social media queens) you will see exactly what they you want to see on the first 200 pages. For lesser popular people with names like "Jenny Zarkaneflaky" (fake person you don't need to google) you will see the one time they smoked pot and got quoted in the school newspaper for saying all people on the planet should die.

That's not really a solution though.

There's precedent for this in some fields. The UK's Rehabilitation of Offenders Act prohibits asking about most old convictions in most circumstances precisely because it's better for society to give opportunities for ex-cons and yet most employers see a black mark on a record and run away.

I think it is a bandaid, but the proper solution would (1) require massive social engineering and (2) be really hard.

They're not mutually exclusive. And anyways, given the option of improving a tool/legislation vs improving the nature of human judgement, I will always take the former.

Exactly. Proposing that businesses change their attitude towards liability when there's no clear downside is just self deceit

To me, that the "internet is forever" is utterly inhumane.

But I live in a country (the US) which is savagely vindictive towards "criminals" (though only poor criminals) both by cultural tradition and as a means towards suppression of minorities.

I'm white, but my name is more common amongst black Americans. If you google me, some of the top image hits are mugshots of unfortunate black people. It doesn't affect me, but it reminds me of how awful it is that mugshots have become so easily aggregated and republished.

The whole mugshot industry is such a racket that needs complete overhaul and regulation. Probably separate regulation then "right to be forgotten".

Actually the entire "public records" industry including your family members birth certificates, etc.. I get the idea of making something public record, but to aggregate it and automatically purchase this data from government data holders is down-right-scuzzy. Often these companies also make it available for instant search then claim you have the right to take it down, but not without signing up with your email and agreeing to a bunch of BS. Yes we definitely need legislation here.

I think this is much like the decision made by a journalist whether to publish.

Journalists sometimes talk about the public's "right to know". This directly contracts an individual's "right to privacy," so the journalist has to weigh balancing interests and make a decision. (If they screw up, the courts will review it, though the damage is done.)

Years later, it's not unreasonable for some other person to weigh these balancing interests again. Someone has to make the call balancing the public's "right to history" versus the individual's "right to be forgotten".

This can't be automated. You're not going to make a good decision without some person (journalist or historian) evaluating the particular case.

(By the way, I don't think talking about "rights" is at all that helpful when thinking about balancing conflicting interests.)

This is a very good way of describing the problem. Journalists are humans that search out salient news and stories and work on bringing it before the public. There (should be) professional ethics in their work that inform these choices. Google, meanwhile, just throws up whatever it finds. It's doubtful a journalist would ever take interest in the odd smattering of risqué/questionable moments of your neighbor, but Google's more than happy to serve them all up at your request.

We as a society have decided to keep public records. I don't see anyone advocating that we clean everyone's record after they repay their debt to society. We still have background checking services and they don't have to enforce a right to be forgotten. I assume county record searches don't have to enforce a right to be forgotten. I also assume a specifically focuses criminal record website doesn't have to enforce a right to he forgotten. It seems a little weird to enforce it on Google under some pretence that he should have a clean record after repaying his debts to society.

It's about the searching feature, not about the fact that the data is recorded somewhere. So if you knew that it was published in some newspaper you could always go and look it up, but it wouldn't be the first hit in google anymore.

The easy solution, and this is what a lot of newspapers in Germany do, atleast for most stories, is to not use the real name or only a shorted (ie, Albert E. or Qubert T. instead of Albert Einstein).

Also think if you are the employer. If I'm hiring somebody (which is inherently a position of some trust), I'd like to know if they have a history of criminal behavior. I wouldn't want a murderer coding my next website.

Even that's the easy case. Let's say you found out that they person was accused of groping a child, but the person was found not guilty. Would you hire then? My guess is not, if you had viable options.

Well, the idea that their debt to society has been paid is probably too formal for the real world. Real society is very vindictive, and never really lets any such debt be paid off.

These are primitive times. If someone commits a crime we should be figuring out why they did it and how we can prevent it from happening again. We shouldn't just be putting people away with moral debts. Our society's vindictive nature on these matters is exactly why they don't forgive and forget. They can't forget, because they never cured the 'root cause' of the crime, and thus must constantly live in fear of it recurring.

This happens even if found innocent- it happened to a friend of mine. Devastating.

Maybe we should stop locking people up for crimes, fine them instead (to be paid as reparations to the victims) and let their public reputation instead be their punishment.